Debugging data flows in reactive programs

blog.acolyer.org

57 points·nuriaion··3 comments

I was surprised to know that Verilog is a type of reactive programming language, which basically responds to multiple events of clock propagation and signal transfer.

Why not VHDL then?

When reading through the problem statement I started wondering why a distributed tracing system, like Zipkin, wouldn't work. A microservice architecture seems very similar to most reactive programming systems, and distributed tracing is just the equivalent of some really nice tooling ontop of printf.

Seems like a debugger for reactive systems should be let you attach to a running graph and extract/visualise traces.

It would work, and actually that is a great idea for the situations where applications are actually deployed and running in production, if it can be enabled on demand.

The advantages of RxFiddle above Zipkin-likes are: - the means to extract the right information. The tool integrates with RxJS, and the format is universal accross Rx’s of other languages. - the visualization which is a better fit, compared to trace spans. I didn’t use Zipkin in practice though, does it have other visualizations than spans?

Of course RxFiddle is nothing like zipkin in terms of how polished it is and how much it is carried by the community. RxFiddle so far has been my research result and while it is open source, I’ve not received contributions, so feel free to share more insights or efforts!

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